Time Travel Omnibus, page 327
As I stare, the door of the barber shop opens and out steps the shape of an ape!
I blink as this big furry gorilla strolls out and down the street. What kind of monkey business goes on here?
The ape shape approaches me and I try to hide in the shadow of the Time Machine. But it spots me and comes closer. I see its slavering jaws, its great brawny arms. I shudder and cringe. The ape seems to growl. I retreat. The ape lowers its head. Its hideous mouth opens. In a moment it will charge and——
“Pardon me, buddy,” lisps the gorilla. “You got a match?”
I nearly elapse into a collapse.
“A talking ape?” I yell. “What goes on here?”
The ape shrugs. “Sure, why not?” asks this simple-minded simian.
“But apes can’t talk!” I object.
“Who says they can’t talk?” snaps the ape. “Don’t you ever read THE HOWLING BABOON COMES BACK? Apes talk in that story. So do I!”
He reaches for a match I hold out and pulls a cigarette from behind one furry ear.
“You smoke?” I gasp.
“Of course. Nothing like a smoke when you climb out of a barber chair. I just step in there to get my fur singed.”
I shake my head. “How can it be possible?” I mutter. “A talking ape. Why?”
“Why?” echoes the ape. “I talk because I have a human brain in an ape’s body. My name is Andy the Anthropoid.”
“Human brain in an ape’s body?” This begins to sound like a vaudeville routine, but I am really curious now. “Who would do such a trick?”
“Why the Mad Scientist, of course! He makes me—he makes everybody these days, in his laboratory. He just looks into one of the books of wisdom and then experiments.”
I look at Andy the Anthropoid in some astonishment. “What books of wisdom?” I inquire.
“Don’t tell me you never hear of books of wisdom,” sighs the talking ape. “You must be a stranger.”
“I am a stranger and I feel stranger and stranger,” I tell my furry friend. “But what are the books of wisdom?”
“I never see any, understand,” says Andy the Anthropoid, lowering his voice and looking over his shoulder to be sure we are alone. “Nobody ever does, except the Mad Scientist. He locks them up in his laboratory and it is forbidden to discuss them. But I hear rumors, of course.
“In the old days the books of wisdom are called ‘mackascenes,’ or something.”
“You mean ‘magazines’ ?” I suggest.
“That’s it. Magazines. Science-fiction magazines, in the ancient past. I remember I even hear some of the titles of the forbidden volumes. There is Superdooper Science. And Gory Stories. And Flabbergasting Tales And Staggering Imagination, and Impossible Adventures.”
I shake my head. “Never hear of them,” I confess.
“Can it be possible that there is anyone alive in 2544 who never knows of the books of wisdom?” he demands.
“Can be,” I admit. “If this is really 2544.”
“Are you crazy?” asks the ape.
“No. Just a stranger. I’d like some kind of proof of where I am and when this is.”
“Well, it’s 2544, all right,” Andy the Anthropoid insists. “Wait—I’ll get a paper and show you the date to prove it.”
HE STEPS over to a lamp post. I wonder what he is going to do, because there is no paper-box attached to it.
But he merely presses a button set in the post and comes back.
“Where’s the paper?” I ask.
“Be patient,” he tells me. “We want the latest edition, don’t we?”
He squints up at the sky. “Here it comes,” he yells. “Stand back.”
Out of the air whizzes a little silver cone. It looks like a miniature rocket, landing at our feet. Andy the Anthropoid picks it up and opens one end. Out drops a folded newspaper.
“See the date?” he says. “2544, all right.”
So it is. But I pay no attention. My eye happens to light on the advertising columns—the want ads.
I read a few items at random.
“Space Suits For Sale—With two pairs of pants.”
“Ray Guns and Atomic Blasters from private collection of an ex-rocketeer.”
“Used Space Ship, late 2543 model, in good condition. Only 5,000,000,000,000,ooo miles on it. With two spare fliers.”
“Sale—Green Cheese, direct from the moon.”
I gasp for air, also for information. “Is it all true?” I ask the garrulous gorilla. “Are all these things really existing? These inventions?”
“Of course,” sniffs Andy the Anthropoid. “They all come from hints in the books of wisdom. But here’s a fellow now who can tell you all about it,” he says, pointing down the street.
I look for the fellow, but I don’t see anyone.
Until I spot it—gleaming in the sun. Then I nearly fall down. The hinge slips on my jaw, I am so astonished.
Walking towards me is a hunk of animated junk. A piece of live metal in fine fettle, with a tin grin and a shining body. A living mechanical man, so help me!
Andy the Anthropoid introduces us. “I want you to meet Adam Clink, the robot,” he tells me. “What is your name, sir?”
“Mud!” I reply. “No—my name is Lefty Feep.”
“Lefty Feep? A pleasure I treasure,” squeaks the robot in a tinny voice. He grabs my hand and it makes a perfect fit in his steel mitt. I look at his skinny steel frame and shudder.
“I suppose the Mad Scientist dreams you up, too?” I ask.
“Of course,” says Adam Clink. “Straight from Impossible Adventures. A direct steal in steel.”
“I am trying to explain such matters to Mr. Feep,” chimes in Andy the Anthropoid. “Perhaps you can give him a short history. He seems to be a stranger and he doesn’t even know what happens here on earth.”
“Yes, what on earth happens?” I ask.
ADAM Clink turns his shining face and gleaming smile towards me. Then he begins to deliver a lecture on history.
To condense it for the dense, here is the way things happen in the past couple hundred of years.
It seems that war is the original score. A big war that wipes out almost everything—buildings and people both. When. the shooting stops it is for a simple enough reason—there is nothing left to shoot at and darn few people left to pull the triggers, anyway.
So many buildings are gone that there are no longer any laboratories or factories or stores or offices or libraries. Nearly all the knowledge and science in the world is blown away.
After peace gets under way, the survivors take a look around and try to rebuild the world. But there is very little left to go by, and the war continues so long that no one is left who remembers how things are run in the old days.
In a word, the world starts from scratch all over again.
Or almost from scratch. Because, digging around in the ruins, somebody runs across a stack of the books of wisdom.
A screwy coincidence, that’s all it is—but the science-fiction magazine library of a fan name of Orville Fuzz is all they find left in the matter of printed matter.
Of course there are doctors and engineers and professors left who can remember various facts and figures, but when they get to talking, they decide something like this:
“The world is always on the wrong track, somehow. Maybe we better listen to some of the prophecies and forecasts of the future in this science-fiction stuff. Let us rebuild the world according to such ideas and see what happens. At least, it is worth trying.”
Which is just what they do. Using science-fiction stories for models, they set to work. At first they do not get very far. And then the Mad Scientist comes on the scene, just a few years ago, and he changes everything.
That’s what Adam Clink tells me, anyhow.
“Ever since the Mad Scientist takes control we do all right,” he tells me confidentially.
“How come he is put in charge?” I ask.
“Why don’t you know what the books of wisdom say?” Adam Clink comes back. “The stories about the future almost always have a Mad Scientist in them. So it is only natural that we allow such a personality to rule. He does all right, too.
“Of course, the first thing he does is hide all the books of wisdom in his laboratory. No one else ever sees or reads those science-fiction tales any more. They are his property. He reads them and then invents things they suggest. Like me, for example.”
“He invents you?”
“Yes, and a whole race of robots. We do the work in the new world.”
“And in his spare time he turns out rocket ships and space suits and skyscrapers and planes and little things like Andy the Anthropoid, here?” I persist.
“Right.” Adam Clink stares at me. “Say, you are pretty uninformed,” he tells me. “Who are you and where do you come from?”
“But I tell you, I’m Lefty Feep,” I stall.
“But where do you come from?” insists the robot. “And what is that contraption over there?”
I give up trying to conceal the deal. “I come from 1944,” I announce. “And I arrive in a Time Machine.”
ADAM Clink rattles all over in excitement.
“A visitor from the past!” he squeaks. “In a real Time Machine?”
This surprises me. “I always figure those science-fiction stories are full of Time Machines,” I say. “Don’t tell me you haven’t got any.”
“We have, once,” Andy the Anthropoid growls. “But the Mad Scientist won’t let us use them. He doesn’t want anyone to escape into the past or future because he is afraid they will get their tenses mixed. So he gets rid of all of them.”
“How does he do that?”
“Oh, he seals them up in a time capsule,” the ape explains. “But say—you’ll have to come and meet the Mad Scientist,” he tells me. “He will want to talk to such an unusual visitor.”
This does not appeal to me. Visiting a crazy guy who hates Time Machines 500 years in the future is not exactly my idea of a way to spend the day.
But Adam Clink’s iron hand grabs my shoulder, and Andy the Anthropoid drapes his ape shape across my back, so off we go.
We walk down the street and turn the corner.
“Better take a cab,” suggests the ape. Adam Clink nods his metal head. He pulls a little gadget from a belt around his waist and paints it up in the air. A streak of flame shoots out.
From above darts a gleaming, wingless plane. It swoops straight for our heads, but makes a perfect landing only a few feet away.
“Atomic generation,” whispers Adam Clink.
We walk over and the driver sticks his head out. “Where to, gents?” he pipes. “Venus—Mercury—the Bronx?”
I roll my retinas at him—because when I say the driver sticks his head out, I mean he really sticks it out. About five feet.
He has a neck like a rubber band, and I rubber at it. On top of the neck is a face I don’t want to face. Something like a balloon with teeth. I goggle at this gargoyle.
Adam Clink and the ape notice it as we get in the cab.
“What’s the matter, does the sight of a stratotaxicab upset you?” asks Clink.
“No, it’s the sight driving it that upsets me,” I answer.
“Him?” growls Andy the Anthropoid. “Why, that’s just a man from Mars.”
“Mars?”
“Sure. A man from Mars—like the ones in the books of wisdom.”
The driver hears us and turns his long neck around.
“The books of wisdom are foolish!” he declares.
I expect my companions will object to such a statement, but they don’t.
“These Martians are always criticizing,” explains Adam Clink. “They do it in all the stories. Pay no attention.”
The driver hears this. “What do you mean, pay no attention?” he yells. “Just like you robots. Got no emotion, no feeling. Oo-yay are an ump-chay.”
“Must be speaking in his strange Martian tongue,” mumbles the ape.
“I can speak better English than you can, you simian simpleton!” yaps our driver. “My name is Martin the Martian.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I reply politely.
“I don’t blame you,” answers Martin the Martian. “Now, where do you want to go?”
“Take us to the Great Laboratory,” directs Adam Clink.
“Aw, what do you want to go there for?” objects Martin the Martian. “Why don’t you go where you can have some fun?”
“Always criticizing,” grumbles Adam Clink to me. Then he raises his voice to the Martian driver. “Pull in your neck and take us to the Great Laboratory at once,” he orders.
OFF we go in a cloud—or into a cloud. Because the stratotaxicab suddenly soars straight up into the air. I cling to the strap in the back seat and look down at the map at the back street.
And in a split second we are down and out again. This time we land on the roof of a skyscraper. Martin the Martian opens the door for us. A rubbery tentacle helps us alight.
“Here you are,” he grumbles. “You earthlings are certainly crazy. As we say on Mars, just an unchbay of erksjay.”
Leaving the driver gibbering in his weird Martian dialect, Adam Clink, Andy the Anthropoid and I take an elevator from the roof down to the 400th floor.
After a lot of preliminaries with white-robed attendants and bearded elders—“All the books of wisdom have bearded elders attending the scientists,” explains Adam Clink—we are walking into the great white-domed laboratory of the Mad Scientist.
There, under the glow of carbon arcs, calmly splitting an atom with a simple electro-divisory-atomic-bisector-oscope, stands the Mad Scientist himself!
He doesn’t notice us, being so busy trying to split this atom into equal parts. So I get quite a chance to stare at the baldheaded man with the red face and angry frown as he bends over his work.
“He doesn’t look so crazy to me,” I whisper to the ape.
“Crazy? Who says he’s crazy?” answers Andy the Anthropoid.
“But you call him the Mad Scientist, don’t you?”
“Of. course. And that’s why we choose him. The books speak of a mad Scientist and he is mad.”
“Then he must be crazy.”
“Not crazy,” the ape repeats. “Just mad. You know—angry!”
I get it, then. When they read the science-fiction magazines they misunderstand. They think a Mad Scientist is a guy with a bad temper. The idea makes me laugh.
My laugh makes the Mad Scientist notice us.
He stares and glares.
“What the devil are you doing in my laboratory?” he shrieks. “Get out of here—I hate you!”
“But, sir——”
“Shut up before I lose my temper!” screams the Mad Scientist, throwing a test-tube at Adam Clink.
“Please sir, we have a visitor—Lefty Feep—”
“Get out of here before I disintegrate the lot of you!” howls the irate investigator. “I suppose he’s another hero type, come to marry my daughter. I am sick and tired of heroes running around making love to my daughter. Just because her father is a Mad Scientist, they seem to think it’s expected of them. I’ve got a good mind to melt your molecules, Adam Clink! And as for you, ape man, I’ll sic some fleas onto your fur in a hurry if you don’t remove that below-zero hero type!”
“But he’s not a hero—he’s got a Time Machine!” explains Adam Clink.
THE Mad Scientist opens his mouth and stops at mid-froth.
“A Time Machine!” he groans. “Why don’t you tell me this before? Of course I want to talk to him. Clear out, you two. Leave me alone with Mr.—Gleep, isn’t it?”
“Lefty Feep,” I tell him, as the robot and the ape leave the laboratory.
“Well, well,” purrs the Mad Scientist, wiping his bald head. “Won’t you sit down? Try that table over there. Just move that jar with the human head in it, will you?”
I move the jar. “Take it easy!” yaps the human head. “You’re jolting my solution out of balance.”
I drop the jar with the head in a hurry.
“What a thump!” the head complains. “Now I’ve got a headache. Would you mind slipping an aspirin into my mouth?”
“Yes, I would mind very much,” I gulp.
The Mad Scientist fixed up the head with a bromo seltzer as I sit down and try to relax. Then he turns to me.
“Now what’s all this about a Time Machine?” he asks.
So I tell him my story, sketching in my past but fast.
“Very interesting,” he remarks when I finish my recitation of explanation.
He paces the floor. “You know, sometimes I think I make a mistake when I seal up all the Time Machines and plans for making them in a time capsule where nobody can discover them,” he tells me. “A device like that can be valuable.”
That is where I see a chance to do myself some good.
“Bet your life!” I grin. “For instance, I am doing a lot of thinking just now and I get a very neat idea.”
“What is your idea?”
“How about you and I going into business?” I suggest.
“What business?”
“Well, you might call it the travel business. Time travel!”
He frowns. It is a new idea to him. “Sure,” I assure him. “You are the big shot in these parts and I have the Machine. What say we rent it out to various parties who want to take trips into the past and future? Why, in a scientific age it will be all the rage! We can make millions!”
I am very hep with pep over this notion, and so I do not notice at first when the Mad Scientist starts turning lavender around the jowls. But in a second he is positively deep purple in the puss and I cannot help but notice it. Besides, he is yelling very softly, like a moose caught in a moose-trap.
“Thunderation!” he howls. “By Einstein, quit talking about that infernal machine of yours. I almost forgot who might hear us.”
“Hear us?” I ask. “Why do you care who hears us?”
“Well, Adam Clink and Andy the Anthropoid know already,” mutters the Mad Scientist. “That’s bad enough.”
